The
Spaces of A Cultural Question
An E-Mail Interview with Brian Holmes.
Conducted by Marion von Osten

Atelier Europa
Team: You are editing the
next issue of Multitudes on cultural and creative labour.
Can you explain why and from what perspective you view
cultural labour and creative work, i.e. do you think it
is possible to explain the inner dynamics of
post-Fordist production modes due to this specific form
of work and its conditions?

Brian Holmes:
Actually we have prepared
what is called the "minor" of Multitudes 15
on the theme of "creativity at work." The
basic notion of immaterial labour is that the manipulation
of information, but also the interplay of affects, have
become central in the contemporary working process 
even in the factories, but much more so in the many
forms of language-, image- and ambiance-production.
Workers can no longer be treated like Taylorist gorillas,
exploited for their purely physical force; the "spirit
of the worker" has to come down onto the factory
floor, and from there it can gain further autonomy by
escaping into the flexible work situations developing
in the urban territory. These notions have made it through
to mainstream sociology, and several authors have taken
artistic production as the model for the new managerial
techniques and ideologies of contemporary capitalism,
with all its inequality, self-exploitation and exclusion.
The most recent example is Pierre Menger's Portrait
de l'artiste en travailleur (Portrait of the Artist
as a Worker).We don't see it that way. Of
course the individualization of innovative work practices
exposes people to flexible management; and linguistic
and affective labour is vital to the capitalist economy
in terms of shaping the mind-set in which a commodity
can become desirable. But we also focus on the real
autonomy that people have gained. This is why we have
devoted the "major" of the issue to activist
art practices, and the theme of "research for the
outside." We're also very interested in the ongoing
struggle of the part-time cinema and theater workers
in France, concerning the special unemployment status
which they have won since 1969, which provides a supplemental
income making it possible to live an artist's life in
an efficiency-oriented capitalist society. The right-wing,
neoliberal government of Raffarin wants to dismantle
this unemployment regime, because they know that those
who benefit are actively producing another ideal of
society.

Atelier Europa
Team: Do you think that the
production conditions of cultural labour and creative
work are different nowadays than in the past, and when
they differ, how would you describe the changes?

Brian Holmes:
Well, not only is there far more invention and
spontaneity involved in relatively ordinary work today
than as little as thirty years ago, but also, creative
work has moved away from the genius model of the
individual artist and towards collaborative process,
often mediated by sophisticated communications machines.
Many people trace the roots of these developments back
to the Hollywood film project, which is always unique
and requires a specially assembled production crew. But
Hollywood neither invented co-operative production, nor
has any patent on it! A journal like Multitudes can be
made almost entirely through unpaid cooperation. It's a
kind of gift economy. The creative aspect is what makes
these kind of volunteer initiatives desirable to people,
who often do not feel they can really trust or enjoy
personal relations that obey the bottom line of making a
wage or a profit. Businesses may try to imitate this way
of functioning  which would be great for them,
because it's so cheap  but they usually don't succeed.
The great Internet crash is a kind of homage to the fact
that you can't make a profit out of interpersonal
exchanges. That's why you now see the communications
technologies being reorganized around the notion of
intellectual property, where there is still the hope of
extorting some money.
Of course, you could explain all this cooperative
creation as a search for prestige and publicity, which
brings monetary rewards later on. That kind of
demystifying critique is necessary, but insufficient.
It's vital to understand the preconditions which make
the "gift-economies" possible, such as
education, access to information, access to tools and
distribution and even to lodging and work space which
does not require full-time employment to pay for it.
Artists in the Western societies tend to look at these
things individualistically: if they have the
preconditions  what Virginia Woolf summed up as
"a room of one's own"  they do their art.
But the individual solutions leave us all very
vulnerable to the more powerfully organized groups in
society, don't you think? It might be useful to imagine
how these basic conditions for creative work could be
provided for more and more people, and defended when
they come under attack, as they are now (think of the
massive attacks on free education, or on the political
freedoms of the Internet). I think you'd find that in
our time, the huge problem of how to make democracy
actually deliver on its promise of emancipation comes
down to this question: How to achieve greater access to
knowledge and culture, to their transformation and
transmission? Because regaining democratic control from
the media oligarchies requires achieving exactly that.

Atelier Europa
Team: In Germany and Britain,
with different political papers like the Schrφder/Blair
Paper, but as well in managerial literature, artists'
working life and diverse methods of creating meaning
have been quoted for the model of an entrepreneurial
self, a subject which synchronizes life and work time
under the banner of economic success. I think that this
quotation of the artist as a role model was very harmful
for collective and critical cultural practices in the
90s. The French situation seems to me a bit different.
I see that the cultural producer and the notion of immaterial
labour is much more set in an understanding of subversion
or even resistance.

Brian Holmes:
France is a country which traditionally values all kinds
of sophisticated cultural production, and it has a
relatively strong institutional left which has been
partially articulated around the idea of cultural
democratization since the Popular Front of '36. So you
have a lot of institutionalized space for creative
practices; and although the socialist culture minister
Jack Lang tried to make these cultural activities
"profitable" in the 1980s, that has always
been a kind of fiction, because the cultural sphere has
mainly expanded with the backing of the state. From the
cynical viewpoint, you can say that when the socialists
came to power they bought off an important constituency,
the artists, and surrounded them with an incredible
amount of bureaucratic control so they wouldn't make any
more trouble. This means you have much less of an "underground"
in France, and consequently, less of that typically
Anglo-American dynamic where the pop-culture and
advertising industries constantly prey on the
underground, to siphon off talent and market subcultural
desire. So despite the situationist echoes that still
linger, and despite all the Italian exiles who have
produced such interesting theory in France, until
recently the resistance was mainly from the professions,
the theater and cinema people in particular  always
with the unions as a model of collective action, deeply
entrenched in representational politics. Only recently
has this resistance become actively subversive in the
strong sense of really questioning contemporary social
roles and positions. With any luck, the right's attempt
to force a complacent cultural class out of their state
sinecures will produce even more of the new and virulent
activist critique that we're seeing from the part-time
cinema and theater workers.

Atelier Europa
Team: Do you think that when
artists or cultural producers are addressed as a new
role model in society, it is a sign that they should
start to organize themselves politically and/or collaborate
with other political movements which resist and fight
against neo-liberalism?

Brian Holmes:
Clearly I do! Now we can see that the privileged
position which cultural production held in the European
social democracies of the eighties and nineties is
always expendable, from the managerial viewpoint. You
can be cut like any other client of the obsolete welfare
state. If artists want to go on developing
experimentation outside the narrow frames of elite
patronage and state-backed cultural tourism, they have
to develop critical discourses that provide other
foundations of judgment for the distribution of
resources, beyond "taste" and box-office
measurements. But those discourses won't spontaneously
emerge from within the cultural establishment. Other
people have to be brought into the game, who have "normally"
been excluded. I'm talking both about directly oppressed
groups, and about people who are somehow interested in
social equality, both of whom would formerly have had no
time for the art world with its elite games of prestige
and posing. But why is there any space for such people
at all? Because elements of the existing art discourses
consider aesthetic experimentation as a starting point
for the transformation of what in French is called
"le partage du sensible": the division and
sharing of the sensible world. This is why describing
how artistic practices work within protest contexts can
be useful for opening up the cultural spaces. I've
argued that it suggests the need for at least a partial
change of museums into something more like resource
centers for transversal communicational practices, where
artists and social movements come together, where
identities and disciplines blur. We can now envision
some attempts to network these kinds of attempts across
the national borders. Gerald Raunig and his
collaborators are trying explicitly to do that, with
their multilingual Republicart website. The urgency is
to begin developing frame discourses, shared positions
that can exert a more coherent pressure on
decision-making within the cultural infrastructures. I'm
not talking about a point-by-point program. I'm talking
about building up a recognizable, coherent and
compelling discussion about the desirability and
viability of a democratic, socially transversal,
politically oriented cultural/artistic sphere  an
open, dissolving sphere in which the material and legal
preconditions of multiplicity become a matter of
collective concern. This kind of discussion (what you
might also call a "problematic") becomes a
resource for specific arguments, gestures, judgments,
actions. Maybe this is how you change the world from a
basis in cultural production.

Atelier Europa
Team: I find it interesting
that immaterial labour or its notion has come out of
the understanding that the industrial complex has been
transformed. The car industry is still a role model
for "new labour" discourses, as one can see
in the Italian operaist movement around the Fiat strikes,
as well as the Hartz commission in Germany, on new forms
of labour organization, monetarization and the idea
of Ich-AG, or self-organized one-person firm, based
on ideas developed before the background of transforming
the VW Factory. Even the word post-Fordism relates to
the concept of Henry Ford and his model of car production
and consumption. Gramsci said that Fordism, or the car
industry as a meta role model for modern economy, would
be an ideological turn, to make us believe that there
is only one understanding of production and capital
accumulation. This was a critique put forth by feminism
as well, which claimed other forms of labour to be relevant
in the industrial age, as well as nowadays. Would you
say that the term immaterial labour is epistemologically
rooted in the industrial concept of labour, of controlling
bodies, optimizing time and production flows, organizing
efficiency, and pushing everything towards commodification?
And how, if so, can we free this term from that classical
concept and develop a term that reflects non-work, care-work,
the production of the social, etc., not only out of
a perspective of capitalist accumulation?

Brian Holmes:
This is a key question for the Multitudes group. The
answer might consider the term "immaterial labour"
and the arguments behind it as a kind of transitional
moment. Those arguments were first elaborated from an
observation of the "refusal of work" in the
wake of the big strikes at Fiat and so forth; but also
from the realization that the bosses had deliberately
changed the very conditions of labour, to make traditional
strike techniques ineffective. Work was increasingly
automated, factories became smaller with electronic
co-ordination between distant production sites, the
remaining workers were implicated ever more deeply by
giving them higher levels of training and responsibility.
But many people had left the factories quite voluntarily,
in advance of the bosses' strategies, setting themselves
up within the smaller, self-organized production chains
of the new "industrial districts" of Northern
Italy.The great strikes and the innovative
pioneers of the new labour patterns could be seen as
the driving forces of a change overtaking the entire
industrial system. A fresh reading of the Grundrisse
of Marx  and particularly of the so-called "fragment
on machines," which points toward the potential
for labour itself to become obsolete through technological
progress, freeing up time for the cultural and intellectual
development of workers, and in the same blow, dissolving
the possibility of exploitation on which capital accumulation
is founded  became a way to chart a future for the
class beyond the wage-bargaining which had become the
major function of unions, and indeed, beyond the condition
of salaried labour itself. This is Toni Negri's analysis
in Marx Beyond Marx. But from that point forth, two
still-unresolved challenges open up for the relation
between theory and practice. One is finding new epistemological
grounds for describing co-operative production. You
can look for clues in Maurizio Lazzarato's recent book
Puissances de l'invention (Powers of Invention), which
develops an understanding of production on the basis
of what the late-nineteenth-century sociologist Gabriel
Tarde called invention and imitation  or what Deleuze
called difference and repetition. The idea is to show
that production has always been based, not on the directive
capacity of capital, but on the human faculty of innovation
 something like what Marx called the "general
intellect"  which is at the origin both of the
forms of products, and of the very machines which produce
them. But Lazzarato is also willing to consider the
invention and imitation of all kinds of affective and
imaginary production  forms of care-giving, social
forms, artistic forms  and he understands "machines"
in the Deleuzo-Guattarian way, as social assemblages.Feminist and culturalist perspectives,
which re-examine our very motives for production, could
add a lot to what is still an overly economic and semiotic
discourse. We need new and persuasive explanations for
what is worth doing together in society, and why certain
activities should be granted the resources for further
development, without always invoking the current excuse:
"Because they make money".But at this point another major
problem must be confronted, which is that the technical
conditions which provided a justification for the existence
and exploitation of salaried labour in the Fordist period
have changed entirely  without any change in basic
social relations. Paolo Virno says that three functions
which have traditionally been separated in the self-understanding
of the Western societies, from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt,
are now impossible to distinguish. These three functions
are labour, conceived as the suffering expenditure of
body energy; intellectual activity, which is silent
and solitary; and political action, which takes place
through speech in public. With our intellectual and
communicational forms of labour in the capitalist economy,
Virno says we live in a condition of infinite publicity
without a public sphere. And the impossibility to make
public meaning out of our virtuoso performances  that
is, the impossibility to make concrete changes in society
 is a humiliation of that which is at once the highest
and most common of our capacities, namely the capacity
of speech itself. This humiliation is a political affect,
which calls for a response. I think that cultural producers,
today, are humiliated by the conditions under which
we work, by what you might call the institutional market.
Can we respond to that? Can we use a more-or-less natural
resistance to the contemporary forms of exploitation
as a starting-point in the attempt to make a world out
of our new understandings of what might be worth doing
together in society? The question would probably have
seemed exaggerated just a few years ago. Almost no one
would have asked it. I find that life gets a little
more interesting as the spaces of this question gradually
open up today.